Another Lurid Saturday Night

Are you stuck at home and need to feel kinda dirty? Here’s a finely-tuned list of some lurid cinema to help you along.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1977)
Faye Dunaway is Laura Mars, exotic high fashion photographer whose work uses sex and death for fashion thrills (it’s really Helmut Newton’s). Unfortunately for Laura, someone is imitating the photographs and killing all of her friends. Even more alarmingly, Laura sees the murders as they happen. Naturally these visions are in soft focus, from the murderer’s viewpoint and cause temporarily blindness, so Laura never gets to the phone in time to warn the victims. Watching Faye lurch around “looking” for the phone is a masterclass in overacting.

Helping Faye is Tommy Lee Jones, as a policeman who badly needs to get his unibrow waxed. This fashion faux pas does not stop true love, and the movie’s first and only love scene, which takes place right after a funeral, is a camp classic. Tommy’s acting style, minimalist at best, highlights Faye’s uninhibited scenery-chewing all the more.

Eyes also offers some Hollywood-style faux-kinkiness, 70s department, i.e. gay guys, dwarves, and lesbian models. Other highlights are Faye’s deluxe Halston-style apartment, a weirdly spacious Soho gallery opening, and Faye’s frumpy costumes and librarian hairstyle, bizarre in a supposed fashionista. One real plus is the location work, which shows the dirty, grimy New York City I fell in love with and miss so very much.


The Best of Everything (1959)
Advertising tag line - The Female Jungle Exposed!
Great-Grandbitch to Cashmere Mafia and The Lipstick Jungle, Best is the story of three young career girls in 1950s Manhattan. Hope Lange is pretty and sensible, Diane Baker is pretty and naïve, and 50s supermodel Suzy Parker is gorgeous and therefore crazy. The plot is sex, abortion, sex, stalkers, sex, drunkenness - plus Joan Crawford as a queen bitch book editor!

Bland but handsome Louis Jourdan plays the roué director that Parker falls for and cleft-chinned hottie Stephen Boyd (Messala from Ben Hur, another turgid classic) plays Lange’s alcoholic amour. Crawford’s spinster editrix Amanda Farrow is a frightening portrait of one of Hollywood’s perennial horrors – the unmarried (and by movieland logic doomed to unhappiness) middle-aged woman. Joan’s face is like Mount Rushmore – it’s impressive and it never moves. The cast is filled out by Brian Aherne as a Mr. Shalimar, a randy oldster, and Robert Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture) as randy prepster Dexter Key. Gotta love those names!

Best's impressive production values include a Johnny Mathis theme song, on-location shots of 50s New York, and color by DeLuxe. As a child, I thought DeLuxe was a person, like DeVol, the composer of the Family Affair and Brady Bunch theme songs. But there is no Mr. Deluxe, sad to say.

The movie is based on Rona Jaffe’s eponymous novel, which is far superior to the glossed-up movie. Published in 1951, the book is still racy and destroys the theory that sex was invented in 1963.

Trilogy of Terror (1975)
Karen Black in a 1975 made for television scream-a-thon – need I say more?
Our Karen always guarantees a good time, intentional (Family Plot, Five Easy Pieces) or otherwise (Airport 75). Trilogy’s final segment - an unfortunate encounter with an African doll - is the pick of this demonic litter and will ensure that you never ever buy any tribal knickknacks, ever ever again, ever.

The Story of Esther Costello (1957)
Deeply weird melodrama, starring Joan Crawford as a well-meaning rich woman who adopts a deaf and dumb orphan girl whom she turns into a Helen Keller-type celebrity. Problems arise when Joan’s estranged husband takes more than a shine to the fetching little deaf-mute.

Story is the kind of simpleminded Hollywood product where the husband must be bad because he has a foreign accent and Joan Crawford is admirable and good because she’s rich and she’s Joan Crawford. The weirdness comes in with the kicker to the plot. I can’t reveal it here but the manner by which the little girl gets her senses back would make Sophocles roll in his grave.

Crawford, as usual, substitutes stone-faced hyperventilation for acting. Her finest scene is when she discovers her husband’s perfidy and goes about her enormous house turning off all the lamps, one by one, with mascara-stained tears dripping down her face. I dare you not to laugh, and I dare not to want to relive the scene in your own home.

Mahogany (1975)
A cornucopia of ineptitude and the movie that killed Diana Ross’s film career, Mahogany is best watched with a large group of snarky, preferably tipsy friends.

Ross plays Tracy, a girl plucked from the ghettos of Chicago by lecherous photographer Anthony Perkins and transformed into world-famous fashion model Mahogany. Tracy/Mahogany really wants to be a fashion designer, misses hometown true love Billy Dee Williams, is being stalked by the rejected Perkins and goes to too many Eurotrash shindigs, so her redemption is quite the uphill struggle.

You’ll never forget the fountain scene, the “twirl, Tracy, twirl” scene, the wax-candle torture scene, the “due due” scene, or the flameout finale, and those are just of a few of the lows this film stoops to. My favorite nadir is Tracy’s first fashion show, a psychotic marriage of Ming the Merciless and Claude Montana circa 1985. Phyllis Diller once described her own stage outfits as “I dressed up as a lampshade in a Chinese whorehouse.” Once you see Mahogany’s couture classics, you’ll know where Phyllis shops.

Don’t forget to sing along with the he ineffable theme song, Do You Know Where You’re Going To? Do you know what life is showing you? Do you know? Well, do you?

The Bad Seed (1956)
There’s a blue chair for boys and a pink chair for girls!
Stage play translated to the screen with all its staginess intact, and a camp delight. Patty McCormack plays titular demonchild Rhoda Penmark, and Nancy Kelly plays her at first disbelieving and then horrified mother. The Bad Seed is an actor’s delight, full of hammy moments, and none of the actors disappoints. Best of all is Eileen Heckart as the mother of one of Patty’s victims. Her second scene, complete with an irrational drink cart, is a highpoint of cinematic dipsomania. And the finale is electrifying!